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Have you ever had napalm sausage with a side of tomato-cracker salad and a glass of buttermilk to wash it all down with? How about rye bread fortified with bacon fat and a thick wedge of multicolored Jell-O cake for dessert? I’ve eaten at more than 2,700 barbecue joints, and my initial experience at Beef Lounge was the first time I’d tried any of that.
The barbecue pop-up is run by Jonny Butch, a pitmaster at Goldee’s Barbecue, near Fort Worth. I’ve written before about Butch’s quest to visit as many old-school barbecue joints across the country as he could manage. The Beef Lounge menu has been served inside Goldee’s every few months, during one of the joint’s off days, but not on a regular schedule. Butch hosted a pop-up a few weeks ago, and the Goldee’s crew helped him make the five sides, three desserts, three different smoked sausages, and seven meats that were featured.
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During his shifts at Goldee’s, Butch routinely uses offset smokers and a wood-fired rotisserie, but for Beef Lounge, he chose to primarily use direct-heat cooking, which means burning wood down to coals and shoveling them directly under the seasoned meat. It makes the meat cook faster, but the method is less forgiving than the gentle heat of an offset smoker. It also requires a whole lot more wood for the same amount of meat.
Earlier this year, I praised Cooper’s Original Pit Bar-B-Q, in Mason, for staying true to its direct-heat roots. As soon as Butch read the article, he said he planned a trip to watch the cooks work the pits. He was motivated because so few Texas barbecue joints still smoke meat that way. When I warned in 2015 that the style was becoming endangered, I noted the places I could find that were still using wood coals. Nine of the 21 I identified have since closed.
When I arrived for the pop-up, Butch and Zain Shafi, Goldee’s co-owner, were pulling half chickens off the pit. The birds had their breastbones removed, and they were fully cooked in less than thirty minutes. A few minutes longer, and they’d have dried out. Their golden, crisp skin shimmered in the sunlight as they rested on a tray. Those same half chickens would have taken at least a couple hours to cook in an offset smoker.
Brisket doesn’t fare as well over the intense heat. “You can’t make a whole brisket good on a pit like that,” Butch said. He cooks only brisket points—the fatty ends, separated from the leaner flats. There are barbecue joints that cook whole briskets over direct heat, but the beef mostly spends its time tightly wrapped in foil. Butch’s unwrapped beef was encased in a layer of crunchy, salty bark. From the cutting block, he handed each guest a brisket burnt end, and mine tasted like a beef chicharron. It was delightfully different in flavor and texture from the excellent brisket Goldee’s normally serves.
Jonny Butch. Photograph by Daniel Vaughn 
Jell-O cake. Photograph by Daniel Vaughn
Smoked ham has fallen out of favor on barbecue menus over the years. It was normally just boneless deli hams reheated in a smoker, so I don’t really miss it. Butch made his ham special by curing and smoking the coppa portion of a Boston butt (aka pork shoulder), then serving it in chunks striped with tender fat. It was great, especially when dipped into the yellow mustard sauce.
From the rest of the boneless portion of the shoulder, Butch cuts steaks about an inch thick and gets them incredibly tender over the coals (the meat carved from the bone goes into sausage). They would have been my favorite pork offering on the menu if not for the superb spare ribs. They didn’t have so much of a bark as a pleasantly chewy layer that hit the off-ramp halfway to jerky land. Biting through one brought forth the melted fat from the juicy meat beneath that was cooked to the perfect tenderness. I marveled at the rib—literally stared at it—as I studied the porcine landscape for my next bite. The flavor of the fire and the savory seasoning were all they needed. Butch said his guiding principle was to veer away from sweet sauces and glazes: “No sugar on meat, all caps.”
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Lamb ribs from both the offset and direct-heat cooker were on offer, so I asked for both to compare. The collapsing layers of fat and crunchy bark of the superior direct-heat lamb ribs turned it into a contest in name only. A stringy pile of overcooked pulled goat was less successful and really the only dud on the menu.
I didn’t know what to expect when I ordered the Tomatoes + Crackers side, and I’m not sure that any description would’ve done it justice. Think of a saltine with a scoop of pimento cheese and diced green tomatoes on top. Now stack them up and crush them together until they can be eaten with a fork. It was at once rich and refreshing.
“My sides are grandma food,” Butch explained, like his carrot salad with raisins in a sweet, cumin-heavy dressing. Dicing spuds, rather than slicing them, for the German potato salad meant they were better coated in the bacon-rich vinegar dressing. It was one of the finest potato salads I’ve eaten. The Brunswick stew over rice was loaded with okra, and the watermelon slice was just that. Was it seeded because it would have been a century ago? I didn’t ask Butch, but I’d bet on it.
As a student of Texas-barbecue history, I noticed Butch’s attention to detail in his references to John Snider’s stewed apricots; buttermilk and hot coffee served at nineteenth-century community barbecues, and Vencil Mares’s turkey sausage. With apologies to the late Mares of the former Taylor Cafe, Butch’s smoked-turkey sausage is the best version I’ve tried. Butch credits the substantial percentage of pork fat in the mix. Butch heard about Mikeska’s Napalm sausage from owner Tim Mikeska and combined beef cheek, round, and tongue with tripe for a smooth and earthy smoked sausage. Unfortunately, the Eterniza sausage—the spelling a play on the pronunciation of the traditional Czech jaternice sausage—did not include the signature pork liver.
After washing down the sausage with some peppered buttermilk, I switched to sweet tea and lemonade. I was surprised that so much sugar could dissolve into liquid. “Sugar with barbecue is awesome,” Butch said, as I took another swig from a chilled schooner glass. The sweeter side of the menu continued with a chilled mixed-berry pie topped with three fingers of stiff whipped cream. The deep-dish pecan pie was also nicely done, but I was drawn to the nostalgic Jell-O cake. Cubes of multicolored gelatin were suspended in whipped cream to form an edible wedge of what looked like stained glass. It was the perfect finish to a meal that was a journey through taste and time.
“I’m an antique guy,” the 29-year-old Butch told me, when I asked why he prefers the old ways of cooking barbecue. He said he was disillusioned with his time in fine-dining kitchens. “It’s not accessible,” he said about that type of restaurant, “and barbecue is.” A meal at a Goldee’s pop-up in 2019 was the enlightening moment he points back to. “It just kicked the shit out of me,” Butch said. Goldee’s was still waiting to move into its building back then. “When I had that bite of food, that is what changed the trajectory of my life,” Butch said. He knew then that barbecue was his path.
It’s no surprise to me or the owners of Goldee’s that Butch plans to open his own place next. He’s actively looking, and he hinted that the search is focused in Dallas. When he does open—and I hope it’ll be sooner than later—it will be a rarity to have a new joint in Texas that chooses direct heat. Maybe it will spark an interest in the endangered method.
The Goldee’s way (cooking with wood in offset smokers) is the continuation of a barbecue trend that began by looking backward for the right barbecue tools and forward to a new barbecue technique. After Butch’s explorations of barbecue’s past, he wants to go even further back. “I’m trying to give people a lesson in history,” he said. He’s rigorous in his efforts to make every bite of nearly every item on the Beef Lounge menu part experience and part sustenance. Even if diners don’t love it, Butch said, “at least they’ll get to try a different interpretation of what barbecue should be and used to be.”
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